Lewis Roberts, St John's
Course: English
Supervisor: Professor Michael Hurley
Dissertation Title: Lines of Enquiry: The Poetic Line-Ending in the Long Nineteenth Century
Biographical Information
I grew up in West Yorkshire, and then read for a BA and MSt in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. I came to St John's in 2021 to begin my PhD. For the academic year 2023-2024, I was Jane Eliza Procter Fellow at Princeton University, awarded to a student from Cambridge, Oxford, or the École Normale Supérieure.
I have been lucky to be the recipient of several prizes and funding awards. At Magdalen I held a Demyship and the Senior Mackinnon Scholarship. My PhD is funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. I am also a Cambridge Trust Scholar. I have recevied research grants from the British Association for Romantic Studies, the Rothermere American Institute, and the Frank Hollick Fund. I have previously worked on the Oxford Traherne Project and with the Oxford Queer Studies Network. In September 2023, I was co-convenor of the conference 'Influence: 50 Years On', papers from which are to be published in a special issue of Textual Practice. Outside of my PhD I am often involved in theatre; I am Chair of Governors of a school in London; and I am an active political campaigner.
I can be contacted at lpr20@cam.ac.uk.
Research Interests
I am a scholar of English literature and the history of philosophy interested in the ways that epistemic and ethical thought can shape and be shaped by artistic form. All my work is concerned with the moral value of artistic form, and the moral good entailed in complexity and self-contradiction.
While holding the Procter Fellowship at Princeton, I worked on various projects concerned with the philosophical standing of literary texts, and the intersection of this work with historical poetics. I am interested in how philosophies of poetry particularly feed into or grow out of the historical place of poetry in education, in scholarship, and in religion. I am also developing a project on the analysis of poetic form by way of computer programming.
My PhD studies the line-ending in poetry of the long nineteenth century (c.1770-1935), and aims to show how a constellation of different methods - including historical poetics, philosophical enquiry, manuscript studies, and close reading – can be brought to bear on poetry. Casual readers and professional critics alike often ask themselves whether they ought to pause or continue reading at the end of a line of poetry. My thesis argues that because of the line-ending’s capacity to be a moment of deliberation, it is, and was for nineteenth-century poets, philosophers, educators, readers, and theologians, a moment where the value of divided thought is revealed. I ask why so many people cared about the correctness, or semantic value, or philosophical standing of the line-ending, and in turn argue that because, rather than in spite of the fact that, the line-ending is seemingly such a trivial, non-semantic part of poetry’s function, unexpectedly it was often a moment where poets encoded their most deeply felt and thought beliefs. I attempt to show that the most fine-grained details of artworks are implicated in ultimate questions of value and knowledge.
My other major interest is in nineteenth-century Judaism. I am particularly interested in histories of silence and non-representation in Jewish thought and aesthetics. Currently, this is centering on the Pre-Raphaelite, gay, Jewish author and artist Simeon Solomon, and I am currently working towards an edition of his literary works, letters, and manuscripts.
Another interest which surfaces in almost all of my work is multilingualism. For authors to speak only one language is a historical anomaly, and accordingly my work has been concerned with late-antique Latin, Ancient Greek philosophy, French modernist prose-poetry, and my nascent project on Jewish literature makes use of Hebrew and Yiddish archives. My work often features my own translations.
Selected Publications
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
'Coleridge, Plotinus, and the Philosophy of Poetic Form', Coleridge Bulletin, forthcoming
'St.-John Perse, T.S. Eliot, and the "Purity" of Translation', T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, forthcoming
"Influence Revisited", Special Issue, ed. Lewis Roberts, Jacob Ridley, and Roddy Howland Jackson, Textual Practice, in progress
"Simeon Solomon's Contradictions", Cambridge Quarterly, 52:3 (September 2023), pp. 290–308.
Invited Lectures / Papers
“Distentio animi: Prosody, Mind, and Christ’, Poetics and Philosophy Colloquium, All Souls’ College, Oxford, November 2024
“Hopkins, Augustine, Poetic Form, and Christ”, Nineteenth-Century Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, November 2024
“How is a poem like Christ?”, The Gerard Manley Hopkins Society Festival, Newbridge, Co. Kildare, July 2024
“Hopkins and Augustine”, Keynote Lecture, Monasterevin Hopkins Festival, July 2023
“The manuscripts of Coleridge’s Dejection”, Invited talk to the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, December 2022
